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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 10:59am Jul 26, 2003 EST (# 13150 of 13267)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

rshow55 - 05:44pm May 21, 2003 EST (# 11848 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.Z9exbJU7wf8.2132500@.f28e622/13463

In an artificial but entertaining movie, Blast From the Past (1999) http://www.newline.com/sites/blastpast/ there's an interesting scene.

jorian319 - 05:11pm Jul 26, 2003 EST (# 13151 of 13267)

RShow,

Sorry about your 'relative' difficulties.

I had some pretty good reasons to think I was dealing with Clinton, or somebody close to him, on Sept 25, 2000. I didn't say I was certain, but that I had "pretty good reasons."

Would those "pretty good reasons" be ...

a) much worse than

b) almost as good as

c) equal to

d) even better than

... your reasons for thinking gisterme=shrub?

Your track record around here for identity inference is an oh-fer, AFAICS.

gisterme - 08:05pm Jul 26, 2003 EST (# 13152 of 13267)

Fred...

"...Now both we and the introduced system (typically closed in the case of fuel or food) have EMERGY ( a historical record of useable emjoules).

How can emjoules, which only exist as a concept of past tense, be "usable"? So far as I can tell, "usable" is only a concept of the present or future tenses where energy is concerned. I have no problem with joules being units of energy being expended at present or even as a measure of energy potential for future use; but thinking of emjoules as being "usable" would seem to require some sort of temporal hocus-pocus. Can you tell me why I'm having so much trouble with this? Am I missing some fundamental point?

The question I asked before about "whether this has something to do with hindsight being 20-20" wasn't intended to be rhetorical. How is emergy anything but a measure of "how well we've been doing" in terms of efficiency of energy consumption?

"...What we and all people want is the highest emergy possible from all our input FLT interactions..."

Wouldn't a historical record of energy usage expressed in emjoules only represent a measure of the efficiency of energy use in the present for any particular process? When you say what we want is the highest emergy possible, aren't you just saying we want the highest energy efficiency possible to acheive that? Wouldn't that just be the "closest to one" ratio of Uf/Ui acheivable for a given amount of work accomplished?

gisterme - 08:07pm Jul 26, 2003 EST (# 13153 of 13267)

Robert...

I also sincerely hope your relative gets better.

fredmoore - 02:22am Jul 27, 2003 EST (# 13154 of 13267)

Gisterme,

"How can emjoules, which only exist as a concept of past tense, be "usable"? "

Who says they are only past tense. As open systems absorb energy and reduce their entropy, they increase their ORDER. A coal seam for example absorbs geological energy and decreases its entropy and becomes a high energy fuel. Its resultant EMERGY when it is consumed is not only a record of its thermodynamic inputs, it is also the amount of available energy that can be obtained from it. More importantly the coal has an EMERGY value which represents the negative pollutant aspects of its creation as well. This is useful as it tells us that coal is not as useful as direct geothermal for example.

In the Utexas treatise on entropy, on page5, is a table showing the EMERGY in World infrastructure, ecosystems, oceans etc and ALL of this EMERGY has come via various circuits from geological, solar or cosmic EMERGY inputs and has been locked in place vis chemical bonding. Any of the items on that list is a source of order to decrease our entropy and help us achieve our 'mission directive'.

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